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c h a p t e r1 :SOCIAL MEDIA AND CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT■together and built some internal support. Otherwise, you’ll quickly discover how lim-
ited your capabilities inside the marketing department to respond directly and mean-
ingfully to customers actually are, and this will threaten your success. How so?
Suppose, for example, that you see negative reviews regarding the gas mileage
of a new model car you’ve introduced, or you see those posts about an exceptional
customer service person. In the former case, you can always play the defensive role—
“True, but the mileage our car delivers is still an improvement over....” Or, you can
ignore the conversation in hopes that it will die out or at least not grow. In the case of
the exceptional employee, you can praise that particular person but beyond the ben-
efit of rewarding an individual—which is important, no doubt about it—what does it
really do for your business? What would help you is delivering more miles per gallon,
or knowing how to scale exceptional employees, or how to create more exceptional
employees from the start.
Ignoring, defending, and tactically responding in a one-off manner doesn’t pro-
duce sustainable gain over the long term. Instead, the information underlying these
types of events needs to get to the product teams, to Customer Support or Human
Resource (HR) managers or whomever it is that is responsible for the experience that
is being talked about. In the case of the mileage, someone needs to determine whether
there is a design problem: Does hot weather cause mileage dips, and are your Texas
auto dealers leading in sales? Or, is it an application mismatch (such as buying a
Hummer to run back and forth to the gym or tanning salon) or simply an unrealis-
tic customer expectation (set by, gee, I don’t know...maybe those EPA estimates that
appear in bold type in automobile advertisements?). All of these are real examples.
To address these kinds of issues, action is required, and the action has to con-
nect the source of the experience to the actual solution. This generally means involving
a team beyond marketing. Otherwise—if the root cause is not addressed, the current
conversations will continue.
What you are really after—and where social business practices can actually
deliver—is in understanding, validating, and implementing the processes or process
changes needed to move the conversation in the direction that supports your business
objectives. In the case of the exceptional employee, what is this person’s history? To
whom does this person report? How can your organization encourage more people to
adopt the specific behaviors that drove the positive comments? These are the types of
issues that a holistic approach to social business can impact.
In all of these cases, the take-away is this: Faced with an issue of interest coming
off of the Social Web, your next step—armed with the conversational data and some
analysis—is likely going to take you outside of marketing. You’ll want to have a larger
team in place, so the activity of encouraging support among colleagues and internal
influencers and decisions makers must begin early.